I Believe in ‘Yesterday’
‘Yesterday’ is spoken ev’ry day,
It’s just another word we say,
It’s not pretentious, trite or queer.
So it’s a yes to ‘yesterday’ –
But very much a no-damn-way
To ear-and-bile-molesting ‘yesteryear’ !
Naymington-on-Poynte
Dark Age place-names,
Leave-a-trace names,
Honestly-describe-the-space names:
Bearing no hyperbole,
They simply stated verbally
What ev’rybody thought the place was,
Giving not a thought to status.
And so we find throughout the nation
Sagebrush prison, Pighill station,
Goatranch airport, Crowfilledwood,
Watertown of the Sisterhood,
Snotti’s Homestead, Northern Trading,
Ladies’ Landing, Stags-are-Wading,
Cheesefarm Green and Hillhill Hill –
Names most Super-Mare and Brill.
But names can be the falsest friend:
Like Middlesex and Lickey End,
Or Swansea, Inkpen, Kentish Town,
The many heights of Lower Down,
Or Upper Slaughter, East Kilbride.
Or Leatherhead and Barkingside.
Nether Wallop, Ugley, Beer,
Towcester, Staines and Wigan Pier
But meanings can survive intact,
As more Bridgnorth than Pontefract:
With Sevenoaks, we safely stand,
And Newport, Battle, Westmorland.
There’s Mill Hill, Highgate, Firbank Fells,
The Mousehole Caves, and Bath, and Wells.
The Otter river is no riddle,
Unlike, say, the Ouse or Piddle.
And if I claimed I knew a place
Called Kismeke Wick or Running Chase,
Or Buttermouth, or Chattering,
Or Shepherds Peak and Hattersing,
Or Owland Buzzard, Wethergale,
Or Buxham Hills and Settingsale,
Or Swallow Spit, or Barnet Shears ?
Would you believe your English ears ?
Future Habitual
At some point in the future,
I would have laboured ev’ry day –
I would have gone to work and back,
Is what I would will say.
But further in the future,
I would have been retired by then
(But not yet will have go to God),
And I can would be looking back
And I will wondered yet agen
At how such phrases once will sounded odd.
The Future Habitual aspect is a clause of speech that linguists insist does not exist.
Twenty-Eight Alone
February, February,
Went and gave his days away.
He lent a trio to July
(Who’d bent a few of his awry) –
He loaned his days out to July,
But never thought they’d beg to stay.
“Oh please, oh please !” would cry each splinter,
“Please don’t send us back to Winter !”
February, February,
Short on shorter days, for sure.
He’ll get no refund from July,
For he’s a seizer on the sly –
His days are dogs, his summers high,
And cancerous his lure.
“I’ll send them back when good and through:
Maybe in a thousand years or two.”
Salisbury Cathedral Vaccination Centre
Angels in the ceiling, salvation in the needles,
Organ practice in the air, the bishop looking proud –
Gone is the busyness of canons, deans, and beadles,
But the locked-up church can once again give welcome to the crowd.
Monks used to pray here, monks who ministered the sick –
But these days it is nurses who are rolling up the sleeves.
So what would Jesus say at their death-defying trick ?,
Their communion, regardless what each congregant believes.
Would he drive them out, back to their lab’ratories ?
Or would he get stuck-in with his newfound clientelle ?
Stained-glass in the windows, telling ancient stories –
Maybe in a thousand years, they’ll tell this one as well.
Strictly speaking, there were no monks at Salisbury, but rather secular canons. These performed the same duties, but weren’t under a monastic rule, and lived in the town rather than in adjacent cells. Sort of like day-pupils rather than boarders.
The Wages of Sin
Thanks, Dick Turpin – what a guy !
Killed a few, but by-the-by.
Thank you Ripper, Jack the Flash –
Take the tour and rake the cash.
Thank you Crippen, bask in fame –
Morse was made through your good name.
Thank you Shipman, take my breath –
Waxworks beckon, Doctor Death.
Lokomotiviy
We’ve all heard of the sealed train
That carried the 36 between
Zürich and the Glasbahnhof,
In April 1917.
A couple of ferries and a new suit later,
Tornio station, platform 1,
To catch the sleeper to Petrograd –
And become the prodigal son.
Finnish metals all the way,
On over the swamps and rugged terrain
To the Finland Station and history,
Though no-one thought to note the train.
One is preserved – it may be the one,
But as likely not – we’ll never know.
Those locos were all faithful workers,
Too busy toiling to stop and crow.
But in the height of August,
Fleeing back the way he came –
Working his passage with a shovel,
Lenin stoked the movement’s flame.
293 – preserved in glass
The only loco we know he rode,
Not that we can blame the pistons
For their unexpected load.
American built, as the century turned,
A proud ten-wheeler, H2-Class,
A broad-gauge beauty, wood-fired boiler,
Black, without that bourgeois brass.
Does it matter ? Holy relics ?
Lenin was also just a machine
That public anger drove to the station
In the red-heat of 1917.
I have completely failed to determin which platform at Tornio the train to Petrograd would have departed from, so naturally I chose the one that rhymed.
Catalyst
Cats crop up in poetry
Like they do in neighbours’ kitchens,
But when it’s time for serious,
They’re nowhere near to pitch in.
They haven’t time for heavy metaphor
Or mopey musing –
And earnest stream-of-consciousness
Will send them straight to snoozing.
But crack a smile and shake some wit,
Or balladeer some derring-do,
And lapping up the limericks,
Here comes the kitty-crew:
Pepperpot and Sootikin,
The tyger tyger in the hat,
Macavity and Pangur Ban,
The owl-loving pussycat,
In nurseries and nightclubs,
In the scary and absurd,
We’re sure to stumble over them
Wherever words are purred.
The Fork in the Road
Sometimes, we shall come to a junction
We’re sure we’ve taken before –
The fingerpost fulfils its function,
But we need it to tell us more:
Did we pass this way in our youth,
Rounding the bend to find the familiar ?
Can we trust mem’ry to tell the truth
When it says the way was hillier ?
I guess the world’s a globe, and feet are curved,
And arcs are circles over time,
And anyone who’s life has swerved
Must one day find they’ve made a rhyme.
And so, this junction has crossed our path,
And forced a choice of way –
And still we live in the aftermath
Of the road we took that day.
This time, let’s take the other of three,
The road untook, the life unspent –
Except, for all we try to see,
We can’t recall which way we went…
Parallels
Somewhere, in a parallel world,
My life has gone the way I’d wish –
Well lucky me, with a wink and swish,
At least I made it somewhere !
Out there in a parallel world,
My work fulfils, my dreams bear fruit,
My wife is smart, my kids are cute,
And I really made it somewhere !
Statistic’ly, I must be me
So he can be what I cannot –
Ah well, at least he got a shot,
No need to be a hater.
So have your perfect life on me,
And make the most of happenstance,
The luck is yours, so grab your chance –
Who knows what’s coming later ?
Somewhere, in a parallel world,
My life has gone the way I dread –
Oh woeful me, with a heavy tread
At the horrors yet to come there.
Out there in a parallel world
Another me, whose dreams are shot,
May sigh, with all the breath he’s got
“I hope I made it somewhere…”
Statistics favour av’rage lives –
Less rich and poor, more inbetween,
Regressing to the boring mean.
I guess we all obey them.
But must we balance out our lives ?
Must parallels be zero-sum ?
Or is it just a rule-of-thumb
To make sense of the mayhem ?
So, somewhere in a parallel world,
I know we must have beat the odds –
Well good for us, the jammy sods,
In a universe unfair.
But right here in this parallel world,
I reckon with some sweat and pluck
We all can work to change our luck,
And make this world a somewhere.
Rhyming Couplets 